sábado, março 31, 2007

Visually magnificent, high levels of complexity achieved through beautifully designed techniques. Technically, seeing 300 is like seeing reality through Photoshop filters. The movie is not concerned with story or discourse but only STYLE and ACTION. We could raise all the questions we want about testosterone, violence, discrimination, feminism but this is not the point. In the same vein as The Cell (2000) by Tarsem Singh, this is an authentic poem to draw, colour and motion. Illustration and design has been elevated to matter of honour, creating an ode to comics and videogames as a complete convergence artefact made of these three media. From the comics, the most interesting effects we can see are the framings made literally as comic squares and even more amazing than that is blood effect very comic like, but with a fantastic motion and depth effect in the movie. From videogames, apart the violence, we have strange bosses to defeat, an unique and linear goal to achieve, no caring for any character, the continuous tension through the entire movie…

Ron Gilbert said "I am happy to report that the convergence has happened. Just not in the direction we had predicted. 300 is a vacuous film filled with bad dialog, stiff acting, a pointless one-dimensional plot and interchangeable characters that hardly deserve to be named in the script. The film barely has a first act and does nothing but drive to a preposterous conclusion led along by a sequence of ridiculous events. The Visuals are nothing more than technical masturbation. Simply put, 300 is the best damn film I've seen all year". I agree it is a damn good film, not the best, but really something astonishing visually.

There was a need to create style guides to distribute among all the partners, and this should be done daily.

"So, in the sky style guide, for example, he explained what to do: Start with a photographic plate. Kick two-thirds of the photographic detail. Look at the splat of coffee on the paper – the “inkblot” – and the cumulus clouds to see where they have the same patterns. Then blend the inkblots into the photos of the clouds and see what happens."

"In addition to guiding vendors creating landscapes, skies and blood, Freckelton created keyframes to help all the studios see what Snyder wanted in the final look. “As the film was being shot, rather than doing film dailies, they did HD Quicktimes,” he says. “I’d take screen captures of key shots from each sequence, and cut and paste and paint them in Photoshop.” In that way, he delivered the color decisions to the effects studios. “They could look at those keyframes, the greens, blues, sepia tones, to match their grade,”

See videogame mechanics evolution of the last 30 years in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This video has been produced for a talk done by David Perry at TED. It congregates five genres: Basketball; Star Wars; War Games; Fighting; First Person Shooters; Driving. We must be careful about the last examples in each sequence because most of them are from cutscenes and not real gameplay. However it's really interesting to see the evolution from Single pixel as characters to the high complexity renderings portrayed by the last generation of videogame consoles.

Here we come again, game designers talking about the necessity to take into account the user/player. I believe here we should have thought about that long time ago.Human-computer interaction science says that we must think about the user, we most develop within design user-centred approach.At the same time if we look at the film industry, as Hollywood, the viewer has always been king, deciding who the good producers, directors, artists...are

So games should have done the same, at least we see people saying "mea culpa". Peter Molyneux is saying now "We've Failed.. we've done a poor job on engagement". Peter Molyneux believes now that we need to accomplish a simple objective:

have players caring about characters in games

At the same time and during GDC 2007, he talked about the next Fable 2 and what it seems to be a magnificent new character, an AI dog friend, that put me thinking about Yorda. See an overview of the presentation at Escapist forums.

Books I wanted to buy during the PhD, that never did because of many reasons: doubts about the content being good enough; doubts about being really in my focus target; and most of the time because of the high price :). Now i'm taking a new look trough all the lists i got creating a new general list of still interesting propositions that i'll try to buy for my next ventures.

Unity of opposites. Each character must have clear goals that oppose each other.

You should have something to say.

Have a key image, almost like a visual logline, to encapsulate the essence of the story; that represents the emotional core on which everything hangs.

Know your world and the rules of it.

The crux of the story should be on inner, not outer, conflicts.

Developing the story is like an archeological dig.

Animation should be interpretive, not realistic.

"Just say no" to flashbacks. Only tell what's vital, and tell it linearly.

Consider music as a character to anchor the film. Music is a keeper of the emotional truth."

"Like telling a good joke, storytelling requires that you know where you're going with a tale. You must know the punchline, the end result, the goal. Then, in arriving there, it's not so much what you say, but how you say it."
Daqui podemos extrair que a emoção anda de mão dada com a linearidade narrativa...(from AWN)

Limitations: No materials available, everything (environments, objects or characters) must be developed from scratch, making it hard to start, manage and learn. By now, any of these solutions still have an uncertain future however they are in a better position than Game Engines.

1 - 3d Studio Max - best architecture for plug-ins, powerful
2 - Blender - open-source with a medium performance
3 - Maya - the best available for animation but very expensive
4 - Cinema 4D - easy to learn, but not as widespread as Max
5 - Poser - very handy for quick character design but useless for animation

"News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news--augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention."

. Generative games, where the gameplay or world is dynamically generated based on choices the player makes.

. Gameplay based on the emotions of (and interactions between) non-player-characters, where the player influences the characters to achieve some goal.

. Interactive storytelling, where the plot or dialog of the game changes in a fine-grained manner (in contrast with more typical discrete "branching points").

. Subtle emergent gameplay, where game systems interact to provide evolving situations. Physics-based gameplay would be an example of this. Another example would be a game with complex interpersonal interactions, like alliances and feuds between groups.

. Novel sorts of multiplayer interactions -- online, at the same machine, with wireless devices, using image recognition, or whatever.»

O conceito acerta na mouche do que procuramos - Research & development of a reusable autonomous character for realtime 3D focused on dramatical impact rather than simulation of natural behaviour. A demo parece ser um inicio bastante interessante apesar de Michael parecer estar um pouco desapontado com os resultados: "When all the decisions are being made about what to do, the Drama Princess actors currently quickly run out of inspiration. The problem is that they can end up in a position where nothing interests them anymore and they cannot get out of it because their filters are very strict about what they like to do and with whom. And since they’re not doing anything, their feelings about the objects don’t change (appart from the very slow decline due to absense)". Ou seja o problema da emergência e pervasividade. Como manter o flow of life, acima de tudo interessante numa lógica ligada à psicologia do entertainment.

"Genpets are not toys or robots. They are living, breathing genetic animals...Genpets are color-coded to match one of several different genetically programmed personality profiles, so there's sure to be a Genpet perfect for you!" See the entire story here

domingo, março 18, 2007

"Making a module for a game like BioWare's Neverwinter Nights is a new way of telling a story, and has its own set of challenges. Instead of readers, you have players who want to feel as though they actively participate in the story. One way to do this is to present your players with a world that they interact with, instead of one they just pass through. ScriptEase is a tool designed to complement Bioware's Aurora Toolset. With Aurora, you construct the world the players will adventure in, and with ScriptEase you bring it to life."

"ScriptEase is being developed by researchers from two research groups in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, the Games group and the Software Systems group. The goal of the ScriptEase project is to support module builders (storytellers) and game designers in automatically generating scripts for computer role-playing stories, without programming."

"people think the aesthetic and art comes from the director... they think the art is brought to them when they get the storyboards... All of that is the beginning, not the end. Usually, the sets are not lit for the effect because the effect isn’t there. We have to relight it. To do that, you need to have a broader background than a technician. In every technical task, an aesthetic component can make it better"

The Warm upMicrosoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education - Aboard the Disney Wonder Cruise Ship. "The Challenge was simple but completing it was anything but - make an original game, from scratch in 4 days. Each XNA Game Studio Express Challenge team worked from Monday March 5 to Thursday March 8 to bring their game to life."

“DungeonQuest” by Benjamin Nitschke and Christoph Rienaecker from Germany

“Simian Escape” by Jonathon Stevens and Patrick Glanville from the United States

"There’s a new phenomenon emerging in the high-stakes world of big-budget filmmaking... video game artists, taking photographs, recording the proportions and textures of sets, and working closely with production designers and the visual effects team to make sure their game upholds the same production values as the film. They’ve become an almost permanent fixture on the moviemaking scene. The reason is because in this era of cross-platform marketing and convergent technology, major film properties live twice—in the movie theater and in the interactive realm... they should succeed in fusing the emotion of films with the intense absorption of interactive entertainment” (Game Films, 2007)